BaaS decided to perform social media monitoring on the Global Change worldwide action.

Our aim was not only to collect the social media mentions that were made throughout the world on October 15, but rather to sense the impact that such an unprecedented global event had on the Internet population.

We monitored the social media buzz around the topic with the use of the world’s best social media monitoring solution : Alterian SM2.

Monitoring Date : October 15 (11:00 a.m. – 11:00 p.m. , GMT +2)

We know that we could have used many more keywords like #occupy #occupyBaystreet #occupyRome #occupyLa . And we know that the mentions would be triple the number of the mentions presented below. But keywords are not the point here. The point is to get an impression of social media users’ reaction to the event (even with the use of a limited number of keywords) and share it with you. Then you can extrapolate the size of the reaction from this small sample.

But enough with words. Let’s have a look at some interesting graphs.

Graph 1: Side by side, the keywords and the volume of mentions

Graph 2 : Share of voice

Microblog (Twitter ) is social media users’ favorite tool when talking about such actions; therefore, the vast majority of mentions were made in this platform. We really don’t know whether the creators of Twitter had ever imagined that it would become a medium for global protest. Twitter has an extremely strong voice. It is the new King of the social media globally. Long live the King!

Graph 3 : Top countries

It was expected that mentions from USA would outnumber the mentions from any other country, due to the country’s population. What was unexpected was the rather poor reaction from countries like Germany and France in the social media. Judging from the 8 o’ clock news, we may conclude that Germans and French preferred to act rather than talk – which is more than we can say for the Greeks in this case! On the other hand, Germans and French may prefer to talk about the subject in their native languages without using any of the abovementioned keywords.

Graph 4: Here is a longer list of the countries where the subject was mentioned. We should remind you that different keywords are used in each country, depending on the native language of the users. This list only presents the number of mentions that contained the English keywords used for this research.

Graph 5 : Demographics

The following graph shows how many mentions were made by men and how many were mad by women. (We should note that a large number of social media users do not state their gender in their Internet profiles). Now extrapolate this in the total number of mentions made with the use of any possible keyword and in any language.

Graph 6 : Content Tone Analysis

This is a very enlightening graph. It provides information on the emotional tone of the mentions. Neutral mentions prevail because the majority of users do not express intense feelings and are rather cool. The rest of the users mentioned #GlobalChange and the other keywords both in a positive and in a negative tone. People who were in a ‘good mood’, simply expressed their admiration for this global call for action. On the other hand, people who were in a “bad mood”, expressed their negative feelings for the Goverments that seem to not care anymore for their citizens, and are only preoccupied with Money. Is our global society moving towards a dead end ?

Graph 7: Popularity

The Popularity Graph shows that many mentions became very popular (popularity index over 4). Imagine that you tweet your opinion in wonderful Spain, and then someone in Los Angeles, USA, retweets it and makes it visible to his 2.000 followers, who then share it again with their own followers and so on. So the 88 most popular mentions in this graph (at popularity index 10) may have been read by millions of people worldwide!

Graph 8 : Top Domains

Although we have already showed that Twitter is THE top domain, each different Twitter account is considered a different domain; therefore, there is no bar with the overall Twitter mentions in the following graph. So, we see Flickr.com and Google+ in the first positions.

You can draw your own conclusions. Some people might ask why Facebook is absent. We believe there are 2 reasons for this. First of all, Facebook users do not seem to use the same hashtags as users of other platforms. And secondly, we are not allowed to monitor personal profiles due to Facebook’s terms of service for the protection of privacy. Still, there are so many public pages on Facebook for causes like this – don’t forget that the Indignants’ protests started from Facebook – that the absence of this social network from the Top Domains chart is rather suprising.

Graph 9: Emotions in Content

What kind of emotions were mostly expressed in all these mentions ? “Social” emotions prevailed - after all, we are talking about a call for social protest in the social media! At the same time, people seem to believe that “Money” is the cause of their sufferings.

A simple conclusion :

The call for action and global change made a point: that people demand change. A change towards a more ‘human’ world. People from different nations seem to agree that we took the wrong road – the road of greed and deception that leads to social decay instead of prosperity. This action is not about Capitalism, Socialism or Communism. It is about common sense. But is anybody really listening? We can’t believe that Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy or other leaders do not understand that societies are prey to stock exchange indices. But we believe it is time for them to think globally and disengage from this financial war. It is time for them to follow the KISS methodology: “Keep it simple (stupid simple)”.

It’s time for a real Global Change. Will the world succeed ? History will tell. No research can give this answer yet.